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If we were to rewind the clock back about 70 million years

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You would see dinosaurs roaming the earth,

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and this is a very nice picture here of a dinosaur

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enjoying a sunset at the beach.

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But unfortunately for the dinosaurs, about 65 million years ago

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we believe that a huge meteorite struck the earth

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and essentially wiped out the dinosaurs.

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And it probably wiped out a bunch of other species with it,

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because, you can imagine the shock wave itself

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would just exterminate tons of species

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then you would have the tsunami of unimaginable size, that would just envelope the continents

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for some period of time, then you would have the soot

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that would go into the air and maybe, make it impossible for most of the plant species

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to live, because it would be blocking out all of the sunlight

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And so in an environment like that, we could imagine that an animal like this

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would be well suited to survive

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It's sitting there underground

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maybe it can hibernate in some way so it doesn't need food for long periods of time

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maybe it has its own food stash under there some place

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And so we believe that our

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Ancient, ancient, ancient

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Ancient

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ancient ancestors, after this mass extinction event

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might have been something like this

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kind of a mole-looking, rodent animal

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that was protected from all of this craziness

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that was happening on the surface

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because they like to hang out underground and

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you know, have all of their food nearby them

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and maybe they could hibernate in some way

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So you can imagine that once everything settled down

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and now we're talking hundreds of years,

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thousands of years,

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even MILLIONS of years,

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some of this guys' descendants start to poke their head out of the ground

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and are like. You know what? There's food in trees

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and there's no one else in the trees

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and trees are a good place to maybe a get away from

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some of the other predators

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that have managed to survive this mass-extinction event.

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And some of its ancestors, or some of its descendants I should say

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that were good at climbing trees

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decided, Hey! Let's try this tree thing out

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And so you started to have some selection for the descendants

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of this rodent that could climb trees well

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they were able to find food where their ancestors couldn't

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they could find protection in the trees where their ancestors couldn't

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So you could imagine, that some subset of this guys'

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descendants evolved into something that might have looked

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like this guy.

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And all of the pictures I'm showing you

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these are of modern animals, except for of course, the dinosaur

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I'm sure it's just kind of photoshopped in, in some way

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This is a modern Bush Baby, but I show this picture because

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it could have been what some of the primitive primates look like.

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Because a Bush Baby, it kinda climbs trees; it's able, it kinda looks like

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it's able to get a hand here, to start climbing the trees

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but it also has rodent-like qualities.

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But this of course a modern version of it, so

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This Bush Baby's ancient, ancient, ancient ancestor might have been

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that primitive primate, or that species of that primitive primate

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that was a descendant of rodents, that said "Hey let's see if we can climb these trees and find some food"

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And then some of its descendants might have had just

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the right adaptations, found their own little niche in the right ecosystems,

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and they would have evolved into monkeys

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once again, this is a modern monkey; so you could imagine

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a kind of primitive monkey.

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And then, some of those primitive monkey's descendants

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they turn into these modern monkeys eventually

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but some of them they grow larger in size,

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they spend more time outside of trees,

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they lose their tail, they don't need it as much for balance

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maybe it's actually a bad thing to have, because someone else could grab it

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when you're in a fight or something like that

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and they evolve into apes.

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And in particular the Great Apes

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So, one of the Great Apes

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The Great Apes involve Gorillas

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and Chimpanzees

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and the ancestor, or really the Great Apes also include Humanity

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So let me just review back on this timeline,

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just so we don't get confused,

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I'll review what we just talked about.

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So before this mass-extinction event 65 million years ago,

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you had all these types of species here

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maybe this right up here, maybe this was

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actually if I'm talking about species,

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maybe this was Tyrannosaurus Rex

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because the dinosaurs involved a whole bunch of - -

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so this might have been T. Rex,

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and I mean there's a bunch of species we could list over here,

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but after that mass-extinction event

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that was an endpoint for a ton, for a ton of species

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except for maybe this primitive rodent mole-like thing,

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that was, you know, maybe a lot of them died in this event,

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but just enough of them survived because they were underground,

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or just in the right place, or in a mountain or someplace

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who knows where they were?

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And some of them were able to evolve into

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primitive primates

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And some of those primitive primates,

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and this is once again pictures of primitive primates;

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and when I say primitive, these are modern versions of them

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so primitive doesn't necessarily mean worse,

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because obviously these guys were able to find, even in today's world, a niche for themselves

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they are able to find food and reproduce, and,

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in ways, that, you know, don't get in the way of ther people

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and other people don't get in the way of them

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When I talk about primitive primates

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I'm just talking about a kind of ancestral primates,

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maybe something that's not there, uh, today

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Although maybe some of it's descendants look very much like it.

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But anyway, some of those primates evolve into primitive monkeys,

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some of those primitive monkey's descendants become modern monkeys

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so this is, I'll call it M. Monkeys

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for modern monkeys,

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and some of them evolve into primitive apes

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and apes, their distinctive characteristic is that they are like monkeys

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but they don't have tails, and they are larger than most monkeys

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And so these primitive apes, some of their descendants are modern Gorillas

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at some point they break off, some of these descendants are a

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ancestor of both modern Chimpanzees and of human beings

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And we think, just looking at the DNA evidence

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We think that this departure right here, and the fossil evidence

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was about 7 million years ago

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That's our best guess for when we as human beings had

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a common ancestor with the chimpanzees.

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Now you have that common ancestor,

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some of that common ancestor's descendants became modern chimpanzees

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and some of them, maybe they explored the right ecosystem

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where it was more advantageous to do so,

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started to walk on two legs.

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And the most famous fossil of this

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is the Australopithecine Fossil of Lucy

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that was discovered 3.2 mil --, it was discovered more recently

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it's 3.2 million years old.

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So the whole Genus, and Genus is kind of one level of categorization above Species.

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The whole Genus of Australopithecine, these were 4 million to 2 million years ago

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4 to 2, and we never know

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you could always find a fossil that is older than this

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maybe newer than this

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I've read one account that said maybe 1 million years ago

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but give or take, the Lucy Fossil,

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which is the most well-established Australopithecine Fossil

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is about 3 million years old

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And this is a reconstruction I have

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over here of Lucy.

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So this is probably what Lucy looked like.

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And once again, there were many Lucys

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it wasn't just there was one Lucy and we're all descendant from Lucy,

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and it's actually not even clear that we are even descendant

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directly from Australopithecine, we might be a cousin

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we might be a cousin species

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or a cousin Genus, I should say

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Genus is the category right above Species

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So if you fast-forward a little bit more

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you go to about 2.3 to 1.4 million years ago

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2.3 to 1.4 million years ago

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we see fossils that they are standing upright,

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the brain size is bigger, because if you look at the

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Australopithecine Fossils, they are standing upright, but their cranial capacity isn't that

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different than Chimpanzees.

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You fast-forward to 2.3 million to 1.4 million years ago

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we start to see fossils where

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they are standing upright still

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and the cranial capacity has grown,

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and you're starting to see primitive stone tools around the bone fossils

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and so, we believe that this is, these are

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one of the first, so this is really just how we categorize it

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but these are some of the first fossils that we categorize as belonging to the same Genus as ours

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and the Genus is Homo

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And Homo just means man

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so it's the group right above Species of Man

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and we call them similar to man,

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because it looks like they are starting to make primitive stone tools,

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they stand upright like us,

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and they have larger cranial capacities than the Australopithecine Fossils or modern Chimpanzees.

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And once again, we never know if Homo Habilis, which

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literally means, the Homo part means Man,

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Habilis means Handy, because he liked to make tools or whatever else.

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We don't if Homo Habilis is a descendant of Lucy's Species,

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of Australopithecus, or maybe a cousin species

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maybe they are both descendants from a common ancestor

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we're not quite sure.

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Then you fast-forward a little bit more

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we're talking now about 1.8,

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so now we're talking about 1.8 million to 1.3 million years ago

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and we start seeing fossils where the cranial capacity larger than Homo Habilis,

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getting closer in size to kind of what we know,

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what our notion is of kind of a modern person's cranial capacity,

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at least relative to body size,

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and this is Homo Erectus.

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And once again, we don't know if Homo Erectus is the descendant of Homo Hibilus,

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maybe they have a common ancestor,

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who knows?

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It looks from the fossil evidence that there was,

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especially when you look at this range here

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that there was some overlap, where you had

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both Homo Erectus and Homo Hibilus living on the same planet at the same time

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Now you fast-forward even more,

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and we think, about 600,000 to 300,000

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once again, all of these are constantly being modified

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as we get better at finding new fossils, or interpreting the fossils we have,

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or we look at DNA evidence or whatever

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about 600,000 to 300,000 years ago, you have the Neanderthals appear

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And Neanderthals are in the same Genus as Humans,

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so it's really Homo Neanderthalensis.

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I always have trouble saying that,

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so this is still part of Homo.

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And a common misconception is that the Neanderthals

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are somehow a more primitive version of humans,

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that they are somehow cavemen and we are modern men

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That's not the case.

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The belief is that Neanderthals are either a cousin species, we have a common ancestor

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or, that they're actually a sub-species of human beings

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and there is some belief that they might have interbred with Homo Sapiens,

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and maybe some, or a good number of us have Neanderthal genes.

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It's nothing to be ashamed of, it's just something, you know, unfortunately that Neanderthals

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just get a bad name, because of our popular culture.

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If anything, so this is a drawing of Neanderthal brain, they actually had a

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fairly large cranial capacity, although scientists say

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they kind of make one reason or another why we think they might have been more

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primitive than Homo Sapiens, but who knows? We don't know.

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We're constantly learning things every day.

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But of course, the whole point of this is to talk about

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how humans showed up on this planet,

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and the first really human fossils we find about 200,000 years ago

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and this, remember, we're in the Genus Homo;

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and now we've finally found something that looks just like us

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anatomically at least, we can't study its behavior and all the rest,

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and now we get to Homo Sapiens,

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the Homo part, once again, means Man

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and the Sapiens, the Sapiens means "Thinking".

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So we can debate whether it's an appropriate title for our Species,

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but it's Thinking Man,

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so once again the Neanderthals they were either a cousin species

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for a lot of this time, especially once Homo Sapiens showed up,

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and maybe Homo Sapiens showed up before this, we just haven't found the fossils yet

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They were maybe both inhabiting the same planet,

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maybe there was some interbreeding,

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but the Neanderthals disappeared about 30,000 years ago

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30,000 years ago these guys disappeared

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Maybe some of them kind of got mixed in with the Homo Sapiens

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started to interbreed with them,

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or they might have just been killed off,

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because they were fighting over the same ecosystems

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and I have made a little sample here of Homo Sapiens

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just in case, well, I'm assuming most of you watching this video are one

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but just in case, here's my little sample

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We can debate how representative of a sample of our species this really is.